The Architecture of Metabolism. Inventing a Culture of Resilience

8/9/2019 The Architecture of Metabolism. Inventing a Culture of Resilience

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Arts 2014, 3, 279-297; doi:10.3390/arts3020279

artsISSN 2076-0752

www.mdpi.com/journal/arts Article

The Architecture of Metabolism.

Inventing a Culture of Resilience

Meike Schalk

Meike Schalk, Assistant Professor, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and the

Built Environment, Östermalmsgatan 26, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden;

E-Mail: [email protected]; Tel.: +46-73-6000906

Received: 10 May 2014; in revised form: 6 June 2014 / Accepted: 10 June 2014 /

Published : 13 June 2014

Abstract: The Metabolist movement, with its radical and visionary urban and architectural

schemes, drew the attention of an international architecture community to Japan in the1960s and 1970s. Seen from a contemporary perspective, the movement’s foremost

concern was cultural resilience as a notion of national identity. Metabolism responded to

the human and environmental catastrophe that followed the atomic bombing of Japan and

vulnerability to natural disasters such as earthquakes, with architecture envisioning the

complete transformation of Japan as a system of political, social, and physical structures

into resilient spatial and organizational patterns adaptable to change. Projecting a utopia of

resilience, Metabolism employed biological metaphors and recalled technoscientific

images which, together with the vernacular, evoked the notion of a genetic architecture

able to be recreated again and again. A specific concern was to mediate between anurbanism of large, technical and institutional infrastructures and the freedom of the

individual. My aim is to critically examine the notion of sustainable architecture by

rereading Metabolist theories and products, such as terms, models, projects, and buildings.

For a better understanding of the present discourse, this text searches for a possible history

of sustainable architecture, a subject mostly presented ahistorically.

Keywords: metabolism; cultural resilience; systemic change; genetic architecture, national

identity

OPEN ACCESS


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1. Introduction

“Sustainable architecture,” as a response to environmental crisis, has become an overly used term in

recent decades as a result of its broad applicability but typically partial application. Here, the term is

reduced to its technical capacities, which can easily be translated to specific products while shedding

its undesired regulative connotations. The term is mainly used to refer to recent ecotechnical building

solutions, new materials, and ecolabeling, and rarely to social and cultural settings and practices.

Despite the emergence of new building regulations, sustainable architecture is seldom discussed as a

possible driver of greater systemic change, which would have to involve a radical rethinking of

mainstream economics, consumption patterns, and sustainable life styles. This article explores the case

of Metabolism in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, which drew the attention of the international

architecture community with its radical and visionary urban and architectural schemes targeting a

sustainable society. Metabolism’s foremost agenda, seen from a contemporary perspective, addressed aconcern for cultural resilience as a notion of national identity. It responded to the human and

environmental catastrophe of the atomic bombing of Japan and the country’s vulnerability to natural

disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis. Its architectures envisioned a complete transformation of

Japan as a system of political, social, and physical structures into resilient spatial and organizational

patterns adaptable to change.

Envisioning a utopia of resilience, Metabolist architects employed biological metaphors, recalled

technoscientific images, and evoked the notion of a recreatable genetic architecture in vernacular

forms. They strove to mediate between an urbanism of large technical, and institutional infrastructures

and the individual freedom with an architecture of customized cells and adaptable temporaryconfigurations of dwellings, which could expand and shrink according to need.

One of the latest engagements with Metabolism is, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks… by Rem

Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist (2009). It is an extensive compendium of interviews with the

protagonists of the movement, by then in their seventies and eighties, previously unknown archive

material, and photographs documenting the making of the book and revisiting the architecture. By

unearthing the Metabolists’ theoretical and political stances—Marxist influences and the movement’s

close relationship to a strong state and planning administration—and showing the protagonists’

studious research, the authors attempt to understand the movement’s revolutionary content, the success

of Metabolist ideas in the 1960s, and its disappearance 25 years later “in the bonfire of neoliberalism[1].” For Koolhaas and Obrist, the Metabolist movement offers a significant alternative example for a

current debate at a time when the market is dissolving local cultures and collegial connections. The

Metabolists took on the project of their country, to be transformed with new tools derived from its own

traditions. The group of widely diverse individuals joined in a strategic alliance and mobilized a vast

range of other disciplines.

I claim that revisiting the Metabolist aesthetic and political strategies unearths a historical strand of

sustainable architecture and that Metabolist schemes reveal a range of political issues concerning

authority and citizen agency that remain highly relevant in a debate about sustainable architecture. My

aim is to critically examine the notion of sustainable architecture through the rereading of Metabolist

theories and products such as terms, models, projects and buildings. Central questions are: How were

sustainable future architectures presented in the Metabolist schemes? What kind of life and culture was


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envisioned? What notions of organizational patterns were brought forward? And how did they translate

to the built environment and the use of space and infrastructure? To better understand the present

discourse, this text searches for a possible history of sustainable architecture, a subject mostly

presented ahistorically.

2. Resilient Urbanism

The concept of resilience first emerged in the 1970s in relation to ecosystems. Recently, it has

become a key concept in contemporary urbanism in the context of environmental, economic, and

social crisis. However, resilience is mostly addressed in environmental and technical terms and often

disregards social and cultural implications [2]. Resilience deals with the ability of systems to adapt

under change; thus, it also offers potential to rethink assumptions and build new systems [3]. Although

the term was not in use when Metabolism was introduced to the international design community at theWorld Design Conference in Tokyo, 1960, the conceptual take of the Metabolists is that of resilient

urbanism in technical, socio-ecological, and cultural terms. A resilient society implies here its

systematic spatial reorganization in order to achieve a balance between change and preservation as

expressed in the design of different life cycles of infrastructures and individual cells, and of permanent

and flexible parts of the urban system. The Metabolists approached resilience less as an ecosystemic

response to change, but especially in terms of the capacity of societies’ to adapt in times of crisis.

Beside its influence on the Japanese architectural community, Metabolism had a decisive impact on

Western architectural and urban discourse [4]. Conceived for the World Design Conference in Tokyo,

the first international event Japan ever staged, it introduced new urban issues and turned the WorldDesign Conference into a forum where cultural differences were discussed in relation to the Western

debate. Going beyond a search for Japanese cultural identity distinct from Western models, however,

Metabolism strove for new models, terms, and images that could be applied more generally, and

reflected a broader shift, not limited to Japan, marked by the end of the Congrès internationaux

d’architecture moderne (CIAM). With biological language, Metabolists connected traditional models

with ahistoric, universally applicable, and structuralist spatial conceptions. They thus created a base for

international communication. At the same time, their rhetoric of nature and the organic fulfilled an

accepted Western stereotype of Japan that can be noted earlier in Frank Lloyd Wright’s and Bruno

Taut’s organic projections. With Metabolism, the specifically Japanese re-emerges on modern terms.The network becomes the most central urban issue – an organizational form, but also a symbolic image

presenting the city and the region simultaneously as structure, organization, and flow, a coherent whole

in constant change and.

3. Envisioning Reorganization

The architectural historian Ryuichi Hamaguchi divides post-war modernism in Japan into two

separate decades. After the war, all the main cities were in ruins, particularly Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

‘where the atomic bomb had barely left a blade of grass.’ Not much was constructed during these

years, which were instead characterized by discussions and theoretical exchange. Early rationalism and

functionalism as guiding theories were taken up again, and only when the economy started to flourish


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in 1950/51, largely due to the beginning of the Korean War, did private building activities develop.

Around the middle of the 1950s, an architectural discourse shifted from functionalism to what

Hamaguchi calls ‘aesthetic consciousness’. This new strand, enabled by the progress in architectural

material technologies and building techniques, he sees as a transitional period, characterized by a

search for a variety of creative languages, which can be related to the debates within CIAM at the time.

Around 1960, architects started to take part in a broader discussion on cities and urbanities in Japan,

which formerly had been only an undercurrent of the architectural discourse. Proposals for urban

redevelopment ‘from a plastic approach’ began to appear, though there was no possibility for them to

be actually realized at the time. Kenzo Tange‘s Metabolist proposal for Tokyo Bay represents one of

the first examples of this both theoretical and utopian approach to urbanism in Japan [5].

Japan experienced an economic boom after its entry in the Korean War on the side of the United

States, which turned Japan from an occupied country into an allied partner. Despite its enormous

economic growth, by the end of the 1950s Japan was still struggling with the task of housing millionsof people left homeless in its cities [6]. The consciousness of having lost the war, plus the experience

of the devastation of two atomic blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 in 1945,

brought with it a deep concern with having lost touch with one’s own culture and the desire for the

reconstruction of a national identity [7]. Due to dynamic population growth, from 1955 to 1964 the

total population of the Tokyo metropolitan region rose from 13.28 to 18.86 million [8], and there was

great pressure on land connected with Japan’s specific topographical situation, which allows only a

fraction of its area to be used for agriculture and building [9]. The Metabolism movement can be

understood in the context of this background.

The World Design Conference in Tokyo in 1960, one year after the official dissolution of CIAM,can be seen as an attempt to continue the culture of urban debate on Asian grounds. The conference

was significant for the young nation of Japan in respect to the immobility of most Japanese under the

American occupation – until 1969 restrictions limited overseas travel to only very few privileged

people [10]. The conference thus represented a rare opportunity for many architects and designers to

communicate directly with their foreign colleagues.

Tange was a member of the committee for the World Design Conference, together with the graphic

designer Yasuka Kamekura, the industrial designer Sori Yanagi, the painter Taro Okamoto, the

architectural critic Ryuichi Hamaguchi, and the architect Kiyosi Seike. Junzo Sakakura was the

chairman of the World Design Conference and Takashi Asada the general secretary, both werearchitects. The group formulated their agenda in examining the nature of design, art and architecture in

a continuously rapidly changing society.

Tange, who was well connected internationally through CIAM, had just returned from a guest

professorship at MIT in Boston, and he invited architects from Europe, USA, and Asia. The event was

attended by several members of Team 10, while no one from the core of the former CIAM group took

part. We can take this event as both a marker for a generation shift in general and for a growing self-

consciousness of a non-western architecture and design community in an Asian context. For the

occasion of the conference, Tange presented a group of young architects who came together under the

name of the Metabolists. The key figures of this group were the architects Kiyonori Kikutake, Noriaki

(later Kisho) Kurokawa, Fumihiko Maki, together with Masato Ohtaka, and the architectural critic

Noboru Kawazoe. The architect Arata Isozaki, who was a former student of Tange, and worked in his


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office like Kurokawa, can be regarded as close to the Metabolists, at the time [11]. The movement was

especially formed for the event. The scope of Metabolism was the encounter between urbanism and

architectural design, extending from an understanding of the individual cell towards the organization

of a larger cluster and network communities.

The World Design Conference was more or less the only public occasion where the protagonists

came together as a group under the label of Metabolism. The manifesto Metabolism 1960: Proposals

for a New Urbanism, prepared for the conference, contained essays and visionary projects, but it was

the drawings of Kikutake, which were most visible, filling 35 of the 87 pages [12]. Kikutake’s project

Marine City (1959) was selected for the exhibition Visionary Architecture at the Museum of Modern

Art in New York the same year.

The projects shown were theoretical designs dealing with the issue of accommodating a population

growing into the millions, exploring sites that had not been considered before like the ocean or the sky.

The publication also included an essay by Noboru Kawazoe, the theoretical head of the group, wherehe refers to the nuclear catastrophe and promotes ‘the unity of man and nature and the evolution of

human society into a peaceful state of unity, like a single living organism.’ He closes with: ‘Our

constructive age . . . will be the age of high metabolism. Order is born from chaos, and chaos from

order. Extinction is the same as creation . . . . We hope to create something which, even in destruction

will cause subsequent new creation. This something must be found in the form of the cities we were

going to make – cities constantly undergoing the process of metabolism [13].’

Retrospectively, The World Design Conference became known for its discussions on urbanism,

which continued the late CIAM debates but with an emphasis on Japanese topics, such as rapid

population growth and the development of megacities. The launching of the Metabolist manifesto atthe World Design Conference is widely seen as the presentation of the concept megastructure ‘as a

unique Japanese contribution to modern architecture, marking the maturity of Japanese architecture

and its independence of other cultures,’ and of ‘“neo-colonialist” views of what it ought to be,’

according to Reyner Banham [14]. The word ‘megastructure’ itself appeared for the first time in print

in Fumihiko Maki’s Collective Form [15].

The Metabolists developed their organic schemes of network cities as a response to actual issues.

One of the main problems was discerned as the lack of comprehensive infrastructure in Japan, which

was an obstacle to urban physical and economic growth. Increased mobility was propounded as a

matter of individual freedom. The urban design proposals by the different members of the Metabolistcircle that included Tange dealt with topological questions [16]. They did not envision infill of streets

and new public transportation systems to solve this task, but they worked out entirely new forms of

total organizations that went beyond the existing city. The focus was set on unifying all urban aspects

into one big organism: all sorts of flows were enabled by a basic three-dimensional skeleton of long-

term service structures, which held containers for various functional units of different life-cycles.

These megastructures branched in a hierarchy from large traffic arteries and transportation lanes down

to streets on the pedestrian level. They connected public and commercial facilities with housing, which

was being organized on terraces of artificial land where the inhabitants could build their houses

according to their taste. In this total scheme, everything was regarded as part of a flow, in a constant

process of becoming and declining. Through the reorganization of space the entire landscape of

planning and architecture was meant to change.


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The Metabolist proposals were greeted with great interest. At a time when the profession of town

planning (in the Western sense) didn’t yet exist in Japan, they responded to an urban situation

characterized by a ‘lack of infrastructure’ and an ‘absence of city planning,’ with ‘the will to plan,’ as

the editor of the Architectural Review J. M. Richards pointed out [17]. The Metabolists’ ‘researches

challenge the whole conservative concept of city life on which the recent laisser-faire urbanization has

been based. They try to face realistically the problems this process is throwing up and see the

opportunity that lies in them. . . . [S]ome of the best architects openly and actively accept their

profession’s wide social responsibilities [18].’ In this statement, Richards addressed not only the

seeming absence of planning, but also the lack of public area in the city. The city of Tokyo was

pulverized into millions of small private plots, which made comprehensive planning a difficult task. As

an example, in the case of the planning of twenty-three new city highways in Tokyo for the 1964

Olympics, only some of them were half built in 1962, some not yet begun; the chief cause of the delay

being the number of property owners who were reluctant to move. Six thousand houses or shops stoodin the way of the new roads, and in 1961 only the owners of 1.6 thousand had signed evacuation

contracts. In this light, the political goal of Metabolist urban planning could only have meant the

erasure of private land ownership and its total re-organization. The issue of ‘freedom’ however was

frequently addressed in their projects, now focusing on the element of the individual cell, or the

capsule, and on the new possibilities for mobility and change.

4. Metabolism in Architecture

Metabolism is a biological term, which describes the anabolic and katabolic processes of a living body. The expression occurred already in the urban sociologist Ernest Burgess’ article ‘The Growth of

Cities’, first published in 1925 in the book, The City. Burgess used the term ‘social metabolism’ to

elucidate the process of growth and transformation of cities. Revolutionary in Burgess’ concept at this

time was the view of cities’ growth as ‘normal’ and not as the reason for social demise, as in the

rhetoric of the Garden City promoters [19]. Because a city behaved like an organism it grew and

changed, and thus underwent naturally periods of disintegration and reintegration.

Beside its biological connotation, the term was often brought up in the context of Buddhist values,

especially by Western commentators, stressing the pattern of death and rebirth, as for example in a

special Japan number of AD in 1964, edited by Günter Nitschke. ‘Metabolism’ can be translated to theJapanese expression Shinchintaisha, meaning renewal or regeneration, closely related to the Buddhist

concepts of transmogrification and reincarnation, as Cherie Wendelken has pointed out [20]. In this

way, the Japanese adaptation of the metaphor ‘Metabolism’ carries both a universal scientific

connotation as well as a Japanese spiritual one.

At the heart of Metabolist thinking is the reorganization of the relationship between society and the

individual. Comprehensive planning would make people free [21]. The dissolution of the city into

‘cells’ corresponded to the breaking away from patriarchal family structures and the strengthening of

the position of the individual in Japanese society. In their visionary proposals, Tange and the

Metabolists took the specificity of the Japanese social and cultural context as their point of departure,

but they also stressed that the emerging models were of universal validity and applicability. As an

indigenous model for the impermanence of architecture and a trigger for Metabolist principles served


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the national monument of the Ise shrine, reconstructed every 20 years since the 7 th century in the

Shinto tradition. Another historical model became the 16th century Katsura Detached Palace, which

was extended twice over 150 years into an asymmetrical plan, as exemplifying a Japanese tradition of

metabolic and cyclical ideas of growth [22].

Finally, Metabolism was also an expression of critique. The socio-political area is accused of failing

to adapt to the rapid techno-economic development. Tange and the Metabolists criticized the entire

Japanese planning system for its non-transparent forms of power. A new language was sought that

would be powerful enough to establish ‘urbanism’, a field that hardly existed in Japan at the time in the

Western sense. Until then, post-war city planning in Japan had been difficult, Tange said, because

‘cities did not redevelop as a result of urban plans.’ Instead, the redevelopment process was ‘a product

of the power of relationships’ reflected in ‘layer upon layer of political, economic and social realities

behind these burned cities [23].’ Tange criticized the pragmatic spirit of the early years of

reconstruction. Even before WWII, most attempts to implement comprehensible planning strategies inJapan seem to have failed.

Metabolism created an organic concept for imagining the regeneration of Japanese culture after the

destructions and severe environmental devastations of fire bombings and two atomic blasts. It

proposed the acceptance of Japan as ground zero - a site of rebirth where culture would be regenerated

from an underlying spirit of ‘Japan-ness.’ With this the Metabolists suggested an organic link between

the individual and a fundamental cultural pattern [24].

5. Structural and Symbolic Reorganization

Kiyonori Kikutake‘s own house - the Sky House of 1958 - served as the prototype for the ‘cell’,

staging Metabolist principles. The Sky House consists of only one open square room, floating above

ground on piers containing plumbing compartments appended on two sides of the building indicating

expandability. It suggests possible expansions extending from the main cell by what Kikutake called

‘move-nets’, which would be plugged in beneath the floor to provide bathrooms, storage space, and

removable children’s rooms for an expanding and contracting family. The design is extraordinary in

that it follows the logic of structuralist or system thinking, while adapting the organizational principles

of the traditional Japanese house with its open plan, as well as its symbolic imagery expressed in the

form of the roof [25]. The Sky House can be seen as a first built prototype for the following mostlymore or less utopian or visionary Metabolist proposals that stayed on a discursive level.


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Figure 1. Kiyonori Kikutake, Sky House (1958) in Koolhaas and Obrist (2009), pp. 140-41.

Kikutake’s Metabolist project, Ideas for the Reorganization of Tokyo City, had already been

presented at the last CIAM meeting in Otterlo in 1959 through Kenzo Tange. In consideration of the

lack of space and the high land prices in Tokyo, Kikutake proposed here an infill of towers on the edge

of Tokyo Bay, carrying exchangeable capsules of domestic units. Kikutake’s high-rise projects for a

Tower City and a Marine City (literally ‘City on the Sea’), previously published in the journal Kokusai

Kenchiku ( International Architecture), were presented again as parts of a comprehensive projectentitled Ocean City at the World Design Conference in 1960, and were included in the publication

Metabolism 1960: A Proposal for a New Urbanism. It was the only Metabolist project that had been

chosen for the Visionary Architecture exhibition in the MoMA in New York in the same year.

Nevertheless, the most famous Metabolist project became the proposal for Tokyo Bay by Kenzo Tange.

Kisho Kurokawa and Arata Isozaki collaborated on the project with Tange, among others who were

not part of the inner Metabolist circle [26]. This scheme basically rejected as dysfunctional the plan

proposed for Tokyo in 1956 on the model of Abercrombie and Forshaw’s plan for Greater London,

which foresaw a central core and the city expanding according to radial-concentric pattern.


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Figure 2. Kenzo Tange, Tokyo Bay (1960) with Kisho Kurokawa and Arata Isozaki,

reproduced from Schumpp (1972), p. 111

Tange’s organization consisted of a linear spine-like element made of layered systems of

intersecting infrastructural cycles on different scales, which extended from Tokyo center, eighteen

kilometers across Tokyo Bay, in the form of a ‘civic axis’ as he called it. Tange had conducted several

city plans over the post-war years in the spirit of reconstruction. However, the background to this plan

was that through rapid industrialization, Tokyo city was at the time already on the verge of having ten

million inhabitants, experiencing an immense physical investment, and expecting a tremendous

alteration of the cityscape. This meant the organization of new communication systems was asignificant challenge. They would become, in fact, the most central element in a growing metropolis

where mobility was one of the basic individual necessities. Tange would discuss communication


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henceforth in terms of a characteristic of an open society and as a means for change. As a

consequence, Tange thought, it was essential to reflect on the nature of urban structures that would

permit growth and change. Biological processes became the overall metaphor for managing the new

development. In Tange’s words:

‘In terms of the growth process of organic bodies, at an early stage, an egg has a central core.

Ultimately, however, this core develops into a spine, which breaks the shell making possible a shift to

a new growth phase. In vertebrates, a spine is essential for the transmission of information through the

nervous system from the brain to the spine. When applying this line of thought to Tokyo, it becomes

obvious that the clinging to the concept of a civic center makes further development hopeless. As a

model we were exploring what happened when we extended a spine from the civic center across

Tokyo Bay. I called this a civic axis. In addition, rising land prices in Tokyo made new developments

over the sea feasible [27].’

In its visionary intention, the Tokyo plan is comparable to Le Corbusier’s 1922 VilleContemporaine for Paris, a city of three million inhabitants, in terms of its symbolic forms, and to

Hilberseimer’s Groszstadt Architektur of 1927 in its organizational focus [28]. Hilberseimer had

already put forward an urban scheme that envisioned communication in three dimensions. He had

reduced urban space to a grid structure that would house the ‘cells’, an organizational system that he

called organic. Worth mentioning is also Le Corbusier’s plan for Algiers of 1931, which Banham calls

the first proposal of an urban architecture based on megastructural principles. Its massive curved linear

structure, ‘a super-highway,’ served as the container, ‘like a giant bookcase of reinforced concrete,’ for

all housing, commercial and public facilities, including infrastructures such as a highway on its roof.

Banham recognized the project ‘as a true ancestor of megastructure because of its seemingly unlimitedlength and the clear distinction between the main permanent structure and the infill housing adapted to

individual needs,’ cultural expressions and individual tastes [29].

Tange’s plan addressed a cyclic transportation system on which cars could run without

intersections. The system would support a flow of traffic for between two and seven million people

every day. On each unit of two square kilometers would stand a high-rise building complex

symbolizing entrance and exit, or interchange with a three-dimensional communication network and

underground parking. Flanking these axes would be housing for five million people on man-made

islands, each megastructure a little city or community of its own. Megastructure meant here a

superstructure, consisting of terraces on which the inhabitants could erect private houses according totheir own tastes while the artificial land stayed in public hand. ‘Private space where man lives and

works in the air, and common space on the ground level where modern society unfolds freely its own

interactions are separated [30].’ The entire looping infrastructural system was hierarchically arranged

from highways down to the speed of the pedestrian. Hereby Tange saw a natural order emerging,

which connected an urban system with an architectural system. The figure of the cycle occurred not

only as an infrastructural solution, but was also present as an underlying economic principle as well as

symbolic form. The plan rejected the traditional form of the static master plan and envisioned an

‘organic’, more dynamic system that was able to absorb programmatic changes and to respond to

economic and social ones, a scheme that could grow and change. The main form, the spine,

accommodated different elements with various metabolic life cycles. The scheme was based on the

same principles as Kiyonori Kikutake’s Ocean City project, which Tange had presented in Otterlo as


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follows:

‘The structural elements are thought of as a tree – a permanent element, with the dwelling units as

leaves – temporary elements, which fall down or are renewed according to the needs of the movement.

The building can grow within this structure and die and grow again – but the structure remains [31].’

The tree represents not only a specific hierarchical, spatial and temporal organizational structure,

but can also be read as a symbolic figure referring to life itself, and through its possession of a trunk,

roots, branches, and leaves to change and rhythm, as a historical and social marker, and as a habitat for

other life forms.

Figure 3. Kiyonori Kikutake’s ocean and marina projects, reproduced from Schumpp

(1972), p. 111.

According to Nitschke’s analysis in AD, the plan mirrored a process that he saw as already on its

way: ‘the awareness that our large-scale constructions, like a communications infrastructure, increase

in scale (in respect to space and time); while our small-scale structures, like our individual dwelling

houses and consumer goods (that is to say our element structures) decrease in scale in respect of a

growing “throw-away culture”.’ He continues, ‘[t]hese extremes of durations in parts of an urban

cluster, the long-term large-scale structures, which curtail individual freedom more and more, and the

short-term element structures, which are expression of freer individual choice and of contemporary

susceptibility to novelty, are brought in harmony in the triangle-shaped dwelling structures. The

terraced concrete levels of these structures form an artificial ground and floor provided by communal

investment upon which individual investment takes place in form of private constructions andconsequently reflects rapid changes in taste [32].’

Tange stated that he had been giving thought to this plan since the MIT studio work where he had


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assigned his fifth-year students to design a community for 25,000 on Boston Bay. Various ideas

including megastructures were thus already under development at MIT. After his return to Japan,

Tange carried out some research work on this issue together with members of his studio. The result

was presented in an hour-long television broadcast by the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) in

late 1960. The same material appeared in magazines and architectural journals in 1961 and evoked

considerable response.

The scheme of Tokyo Bay gained much international attention and triggered discussions on city

planning at large. However, it was also widely criticized for its technological determinism and its

monumentality. The danger of the main infrastructure becoming obsolete itself, although allowing

infill and change, was even debated by the Metabolists themselves. Fumihiko Maki had reflected on

Group Form, already in an article in the Metabolist manifesto, as the solution for a ‘system that permits

greatest efficiency and flexibility, with the smallest organizational structure [33].’ Members of Team

10, namely Peter Smithson, also objected to the plan in pointing to the ‘tertiary’ activities:communications that became overtly determining for the inhabitants of the megalopolis, which he

thought were doomed to fail, economically as well as politically. He saw the ‘interlocking’ of all

functions as a totalitarian concept, an organization that tended to crawl into and determine people’s

individual lives. He called the plan centralized, absolutist and authoritarian on all levels – in its basic

thinking, its organization, and its imagery – and instead promoted a non-interlocking of activities and a

politics of decentralization for the deliberate dispersal of ‘value-creating’ centers. ‘With regard of [sic]

the general planning concepts which are brought forward, I have little to criticize – which is hardly

surprising considering the closeness of the theoretical position of Tange and myself,’ Smithson stated.

He criticized, however, the extreme focus on infrastructures suggesting the continuing ‘heaping up’ ofthe population as a natural thing. In more detail he stated: ‘a linear transportation system . . . . leads to

a terrific number of lanes being necessary, each filled to capacity, with a probable redundancy of lane

capacity in the feeders. . . . .’ However, he admits that it was ingenious because it produced a traffic

flow that never stops, even though it necessitated going around right-angles and also created longer

journeys. Smithson judged: ‘The pyramidal housing units over-the-water are formally the finest things

in the scheme, but unhappily as in thousand student projects (from the time of Le Corbusier’s Algier

project onwards), the romance of the idea of ‘each man building his own house on man-made

platforms, stands unsupported by a demonstration of how it is to be done.’ He concluded: ‘The project

as architecture is at its strongest when it is closest to the traditional Japanese vocabulary,’ which isarticulated for Smithson in the ‘straight lines and a soft curve defining the major forms.’ He praised the

formal brilliance of the scheme and its graphic representation, as well as ‘the boldness of the attack,’

which had ‘expanded the frontiers of search for the form of the metropolis more than would have

believed possible in a single study [34].’

Not only Western commentaries, but also the Japanese architectural press reacted for the most part

skeptically to Tange’s project. Ryuichi Hamaguchi was concerned about the lack of professional

expertise in terms of technology, construction, economy, and politics, in favor of ‘form’. Above all, he

questioned the role of the architect in city planning when he claimed:

In my opinion, when the architect functions as an architect, he should be not the conductor of the

orchestra, but one of the first violinists. . . . He should take his place among the other players – the

construction engineer, the road expert, and others whose work is necessary to the construction of a


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city. The difficulty with the Tange Team is that it is an orchestra of first violinists [35].’

6. Megastructure versus Group Form

In 1964, Fumihiko Maki publishes his research on ‘group form’ in the publication Investigations in

Collective Form, which contains an article written together with Masato Othaka and originally printed

in the Metabolist manifesto, and an investigation on ‘Linkage’ written in collaboration with Jerry

Goldberg [36]. This spatial concept differs from the concept megastructure. In short, Maki

distinguished three different ‘collective forms’, the compositional (the modernist space), the

megastructure (Tange’s Tokyo Bay project, for example), and the group form. The group form differed

from the compositional in its way of relating the elements to the totality. Elements can be added and

taken away from the cluster without destroying the balance of the whole composition as in a modernist

ensemble. This consisted of a fixed number of certain elements according to the master plan principle,where the design process was clearly divided into a functional planning phase followed by the phase of

erecting individual buildings. The megastructure, on the other hand, was an open structure without a

fixed concept of composition denominating the infrastructure, a man-made landscape, upon which all

functions and elements of society grew and thrived. Here a ‘master system’ replaced the master plan.

Maki saw the task of the master system in its adaptability to change to swing into place ‘in ever new

stages of formal and structural equilibrium,’ preserving at the same time ‘visual integrity’. Group form

was rather based on a ‘group program’ than on a determined plan, resulting in non-hierarchical

collective forms, in contrast to the master plan and the master system. The layout of a group form

always stayed dynamic and open-ended. Maki described its cluster-like arrangements with the words‘it is not necessary to limit composition to inorganic, geometrical, structural, or mechanical patterns.

Rather group form is an intuitive, visual expression of the energy and sweat of millions of people in

our cities, of the breath of live and the poetry of living [37].’ Koolhaas, in his recent publication, has

compared group form to a social process instead of a technological proposal, whereby group form

‘surrenders to change rather than imposing mastery, and that asserts interdependence among disparate,

even unfinished elements, rather than hierarchy and isolation [38].’

Twelve years later, Reyner Banham looked back on the megastructure era in his Megastructure:

Urban Futures of the Recent Past . The main issue he recognizes in the Metabolist proposals is the

attempt to find a relationship of the ‘massive, even monumental, supporting frame,’ and ‘variousarrangements of habitable containers beyond the control of the architect [39].’ He sees a conceptual

approach and basic contradiction in the marriage of a technocratic attitude, as in Walter Gropius’ total

architecture [40], and modernism’s fascination with indigenous cultural artifacts and built forms,

whose designs appear self-generated and ‘natural.’ The artificial landscape is ‘made possible by

present day technology,’ but its giant (infra)structure is supposed to serve as ‘the great hill on which

Italian towns were built,’ and thus to connect modern with vernacular aspects, as Fumihiko Maki had

pointed it out [41]. To legitimate the megastructure, its concept is often derived from existing

‘accidental structures,’ as Banham calls them. ‘A-formal’ and extensible, such as Maki’s example of

the ‘Italian hill town,’ they differ from architect-designed historical precedents. What brings them

within the canon of megastructures is ‘their visible extensibility and adaptability, their lack of obvious

regular geometry in spite of the fact that their overall form is usually easy to grasp and their small parts


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extremely regular [42].’

For Banham the megastructure – although having been the dominant progressive concept for

architecture and urbanism at the beginning of the 1960s, promising ‘to resolve the conflicts between

design and spontaneity, the large and the small, the permanent and the transient [43]’ – has failed. In

Banham, it presents the culmination and the end of the modern movement, which continues to be

expressed in the modern claim to control ‘the design of the whole human environment,’ while now

admitting individual desires for self-expression, a contradiction that the megastructures were finally

unable to resolve. Spontaneous processes of self-building could happen but ‘within a framework

created by professional architects’ and still ‘reflecting the monumental and aesthetic values of

professional architecture [44].’

7. The Image and the Reproduction of Metabolism

In the metabolist schemes, the notion of place is neglected in favor of issues of spatial relationships,

change, temporality, and process. The interest in exploring new spatial organizational patterns is more

prominent than the longing for recreating a lost place; rather, potential new forms of ‘habitats’ are

explored. The experience of war and consequent loss of place trigger the creation of new architectural

terms, architectural imagery, and a shift in the discourse. In the work of the Metabolists the

architectural image replaces the category of ‘place’.

During the 1960s, the group produced mostly visionary theoretical work on a large urban scale.

However, the few projects that actually got built were of mostly moderate size. Although showing

Metabolist features such as signs of expandability and mixed use, they often only looked Metabolistic, but did not necessarily work that way. This is the case in Tange’s broadcasting center in Kofu (1968),

and Isozaki’s library in Oita (1968). However, over time their program could become more mixed by

appropriation, as is the case in the Metabolist icon, the Nakagin Capsule Tower, a residential building

by Kisho Kurokawa built as late as 1972 in Tokyo. Its capsules now serve different purposes and are

used for living, working, and as space for storage, as one can see through the washing-machine-like

windows.

Two different aspects of the Metabolist image can be discussed: first the early visionary proposals

and second the work that was actually built. Kyonori Kikutake’s built work and his theoretical projects

differ quite heavily in language and scale. His visionary projects for experimental dwellings speculateon urban scales of hundred thousands of inhabitants and are represented in a sketchy way, often in

charcoal with a dreamy character and frequently containing some national-romantic details, such as

using the rising sun reflected on the surface of the ocean or Mount Fuji as a backdrop. Kikutake’s early

built architecture orientates itself towards traditional forms and styles while using contemporary

materials and construction methods. Most buildings are of a moderate scale and well integrated into

their surroundings, as for example the Izumo Shrine Administrative Building and Treasury of 1963 on

the grounds of the Izumo Shrine, and the 1964 Tokoen Hotel in the summer resort of Tottori.

A more ironic use of images can be found in the photomontage ‘Incubation process’, often also

called ‘Future City’, by Arata Isozaki in 1960/61. In this drawing from Isozaki’s competition entry,

City in the Air , for Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, Isozaki represents a megastructure situated within a field

of classical ruins. The image pictures the city as the place where many life cycles of various cultures


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rise, overlap, and decline. In this juxtaposition of the already declined (Western classical architecture)

with the visionary (Japanese Metabolist architecture) and its future (parts of the new scheme already

collapsed), historical time appears compressed.

8. Conclusions

Metabolism received as much media attention in the West as in Japan itself. Abroad, it generated an

enormous interest in Japanese culture in general, and architectural magazines, such as British

Architectural Review in 1962 and Architectural Design ( AD) in 1964, both of which produced special

issues on Japan. However, Metabolism meant different things in the East and in the West. In Japan, the

movement triggered an engagement with Japanese past culture and a departure from preconceived

Western architectural conceptions. In the West, the Metabolist schemes triggered a new appreciation of

visionary projects on grand scales, especially in Europe.It was the aim of the Metabolists to find catalysts for urban development to solve the issues that

came with the rapid growth of megacities never before seen on that scale. They addressed questions of

land scarcity, housing shortage, and unplanned sprawl. They also addressed fundamental

organizational considerations and philosophical and political reflections on the structure and essence of

society in general, and on national identity and culture. The strict separation of public and private

realms, making one part of the megacity an infrastructure at large and dissolving the other part into a

micro landscape of cells, would mean a radically different conception of the city. It shows a population

constantly on the move, freely connecting and disconnecting according to personal desires. This

society was not bound to place; it integrated through the non-representational availability of themegastructure and group form, symbolic images such as cycle and tree, and the idea of an underlying

cultural code.

What knowledge can we gain from the historical case of Metabolism for a contemporary discussion

on sustainable architecture? The search for resilient environments and sustainable architecture is not

new, and, though the terminology did not exist in the 1960s, new tools, terms, and images were formed

then. Revisiting the Metabolist visions of a resilient world reveals several contemporary, urgent issues.

The current debate on how to design sustainable cities is driven by similar challenges—land scarcity,

unequal development, pressure on infrastructures, and democratic issues in planning—yet recent

waves of sustainable architecture have not led to the emergence of more resilient cities, and may never.One reason is the retreat of the state and the prominence of the market in driving development

questions, Koolhaas and Obricht point out. In their Metabolist reader, they show the network of

relations behind the movement. They demonstrate the movement’s agency and ability to collaborate

and build alliances with colleagues and in the bureaucracy, politics, industries, and a wide range of

other disciplines in order to bring about their vision of a resilient culture and make an impact on urban

research and design.

I claim that sustainable architecture cannot be conceived separately from its environmental impacts,

its everyday use, the way it is produced by whom and for whom, political systems, or markets. The

Metabolist movement as a historical case reveals current problems in the disconnection of actors and in

partial approaches, which prevent a culture of resilience. A systematic conceptual approach would

have to broaden the narrow view of materiality and technology toward a fundamental rethinking of


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how to bring about socioculturally just environments, including a change in consumption patterns,

labor relations, and the provision of more effective policy frameworks.

The Metabolist proposals intensely discuss the social relationship between a controlled public

system and the individual freedom of the consumer. In the megastructures, the public structure

dominates and controls urban life. It devises a secondary system of cells, an expression of individual

freedom, and of approximate spatial equality. An alternative to the posthumanist attitude of a control-

system megastructure is that of the group form, which accepts order in chaos, and more spontaneous

assemblages on artificial land that give the power to plan back to the community. This exposes the

issues in designing for resilience then and now: The fundamental contradiction between these two

views is that of the ideal of an informed, active, and responsible citizenship on the one hand, and, on

the other, the necessity of expert planning and exertion of political power associated with a set of

regulations for achieving a fair redistribution of resources and wealth.

The Metabolists were driven by a search for a global scientific language and, at the same time, a poetic expression of a sustainable architecture that communicated a renewed and specifically Japanese

cultural identity. Beyond nation-states, what could a desired future version of this be? Architectural

schemes would emerge, which went beyond metaphors and mechanical and partial approaches to

address effective designs for adaptation to change. Architects would build new alliances and

reorganize their work in transdisciplinary practices. In future sustainable architectures, designers will

learn from existing resilient multicultural practices in cities and landscapes and address a variety of

spaces for new commonalities, aesthetics, and cultural values.

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.

References and Notes

1. Koolhaas, R., Obrist H.U. Project Japan. Metabolism Talks… Eds.: Ota, K., Westcott, J.Taschen, Köln, 2009

2. Goldstein, B.E. Ed. Collaborative Resilience: Moving Through Crisis to Opportunity

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).3. Folke, C.; Carpenter, S.R.; Brian Walker; Scheffer, M.; Chapin, T.; Rockström, J. Resilience

thinking: Integrating Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability. Ecology and Society, 2010;

Volume 15, No. 4, Art. 20. Available online: URL (20.03.2014)

http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss4/art20/4. “Western” refers here to the Occident-Orient divide.

5. Hamaguchi, R. A View of Modern Japanese Architecture – 20 Years After the War. The Japan

Architect , June 1966, p. 19.

6. The average growth of the brut social product in Japan between 1951-1959 was 13.1% in

comparison with 11% in Germany, and 6.1% in the USA. The numbers are taken from theOriental Economist (ed.), Japan Economic Yearbook , 1957 and 1961. The growth rate of

industrial production between 1950-1960 was in Japan 15.5%, Germany 9.6%, and the USA


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3.8% according to the Statistisches Jahrbuch für die BRD 1961. See Schump, M. Stadtbau-

Utopien und Gesellschaft. Der Bedutungswandel utopischer Stadtmodelle unter sozialem Aspekt .

Bertelsmann Fachverlag Gütersloh, 1972, p. 101.

7. The first atomic bomb over Hiroshima, a city with 350,000 inhabitants killed 71,000 people

instantly. 129,000 died within the next five years. 150,000 survived. Joan Ockman has pointed

out that in Japan a certain myth of victimhood coalesced after the loss of the war around the

notion that Hiroshima was the first city on which an atomic bomb was dropped. The indelible

image of the mushroom cloud made Hiroshima a well-known city whose ground zero became a

universal symbol of this horrific and unprecedented form of modern warfare and the focus of an

important project of reconstruction and memorialization. Ockman, J. Out of Gound Zero. Case

Studies in Urban Reinvention. Prestel, Munich/ Berlin/ London/ New York, 2002, p. 16.

8. In Lin, Z. Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement. Urban Utopias of Modern Japan.

Routledge, London/ New York, 2010, p. 137.9. Only one sixth of the area of Japan can be used agriculturally and the population density of this

area was 1,540 per km! in relation to 392 in Germany in 1961, for example. Numbers are taken

from Statistisches Jahrbuch für die BRD 1961. Schumpp (1972), p.102.

10. The American occupation ended officially in 1953 with the exception of a few military bases,

and the island of Okinawa, where the occupation lasted until 1972.

11. Kisho Kurokawa mentions also the industrial designer Kenji Ekuan, the graphic designer

Kiyoshi Awazu and the photographer Shomei Tomatsu. Kurokawa, K. The Philosophy of

Symbiosis. Kodansha International, Tokyo/ New York/ London, 1996, p. 478. According to

Hajime Yatsuka, it was through Takashi Asada, former chief-assistant of Kenzo Tange, whochaired the committee that the Metabolists found each other. Yatsuka, H. The 1960 Tokyo Bay

Project of Kenzo Tange. Cities in Transition. Ed.: Arie Graafland, 010 Publishers. Rotterdam,

2001, p. 187.

12. Wendelken, C. Putting Metabolism Back in Place. The Making of a Radically Decontextualized

Architecture in Japan. Anxious Modernisms. Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture.

Eds.: Goldhagen, S.W., Legault, R., MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts/ London, 2000, pp.

279, 285.

13. Noboru Kawazoe (ed.) Metabolism 1960: Proposals for a New Urbanism (Tokyo: Bijutsu

shuppansha, 1960), p. 48-49; quoted in Wendelken (2000), p. 287.14. Banham, R. Megastructure. Urban Futures of the Recent Past . Thames and Hudson, London:,

1976, p. 45.

15. Maki, F. Investigations in Collective Form. The School of Architecture, St. Louis: Washington

University, 1964p.

16. The following years are characterized by the preparations for the Olympic games in 1964. Beside

building for the games and the hotel building boom, infrastructural constructions peaked, the

famous Tokaido Line between Tokyo and Osaka opened, and new highways and highway

service buildings went up.

17.

‘In spite of the area over which the city [of Tokyo] spreads, the space occupied by roads is

relatively small (9,2 per cent of the total, which can be compared with 23 per cent in London, 25

in Paris, 35 in New York, and 43 in Washington). . . . [N]o street has a parallel one a practicable


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Arts 2014, 3 296

distance away. The underground railway is equally congested. A special body of men called

“pushers” is employed on the platforms to cram the last passenger into the carriages so that the

doors can close and the trains move off.’ Richards, J.M. Architectural Review, October 1962, p.

162.

18.

Ibid., pp. 203-204.

19. The foremost goal of the Garden City Movement was to limit the size of cities and to disperse

and to decentralize them.

20. Wendelken (2000), p. 287.

21. Lin (2010), p. 95.

22. Koolhaas, Obrist (2009). pp. 373, 379. See also Lin (2010), p. 54.

23. Tange, K. My Experiences. Space Design 8001. Special issue: Kenzo Tange and Urtec, p. 185;

quoted in Stewart, D.B. The Making of a Modern Japanese Architecture. Kodansha International,

Tokyo/ New York/ London, 2002, p. 172.24. Wendelken (2000), p. 287.

25. Arthur Drexler had referred to the roof as the most significant part of the traditional Japanese

house. ‘But for the Japanese the most expressive architectural element has always been the roof.

A Japanese building is a roof.’ Drexler, A. The Architecture of Japan. The Museum of Modern

Art, New York, 1955, p. 44.

26. Other collaborators were Sadao Watanabe, Koji Kamiya, and Heiki Koh. Hamaguchi, R.

Conductors of City Planning?, The Japan Architect , August 1961, p. 39.

27. Tange, K. Recollections: Architect Kenzo Tange. JA, August 1985, p. 12.

28.

Hilberseimer, L. Groszstadt Architektur . Verlag Julius Hoffmann, Stuttgart, 1927 .29. Banham (1976), p. 8.

30. Nitschke, G. Die Metabolisten Japans. Bauwelt 18/19, 1964, p. 512.

31. Tange quoted in Banham (1976), p. 47.

32. Nitschke, G. The Approach of the Kenzo Tange Team in Their Plan for Tokyo 1960. AD,

October 1964, special issue on Japan. Ed.: Nitschke, G., p. 505.

33. Maki (1964), p. 12.

34. Smithson, P. Reflections on Kenzo Tange’s Tokyo Bay plan. Architectural Design, October

1964, pp. 479-480.

35.

Hamaguchi (1961), p. 40. Hamaguchi’s article demonstrates the general attitude in Japan that planners are technocrats and not designers, and shows that urban design was a young approach at

the time.

36. The research was published in 1964 by the School of Architecture of Washington University,

where Maki had been Associate Professor between 1956 and 1963, after having received master

degrees from Cranbrook (1953) and Harvard (1954). By the time of the publication he was

teaching as Associate Professor of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. See

also, Maki, F. Some thoughts on collective form. With an introduction on group-form,

Washington University, 1961.

37.

Maki, M. Toward Group Form, in Ockman, J. Architecture Culture 1943-1968. A Documentary

Anthology. Rizzoli, New York, 2005, p. 324.

38. Koolhaas, Obrist (2009), p. 302.


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39. Banham (1976), p. 8.

40. Ibid., p. 9.

41. Maki (1964), p. 8.

42. Banham (1976), p. 16.

43.

Ibid., p. 10.

44. Ibid., p. 9.

© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article

distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

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The Architecture of Metabolism. Inventing a Culture of Resilience